Hi, I’m Luke Baumgarten, you may remember me from such articles as the ones on this website.
If you’re familiar with the entire RANGE multimedia universe, you might also remember me as the guy emcee-ing Spokane’s Spiciest in the short-shorts and, more seriously, as the guy who very publicly laid himself off last year.
Well, I’m back. I’ve been back since September, actually. Sorry for not writing sooner.
The team has been asking me to do this for a while, and I’ve wanted to, but it’s hard to always know what would be meaningful to say, especially when it doesn’t feel like much has changed. And, in September, it didn’t feel — to me — like much had changed yet.
With the help of RANGE’s readers, the rest of the team at Spokane Workers Cooperative (SWC), and a partnership between Waters Meet Foundation and our bank, this project had survived. I had my job back, and yeah, that was pretty important for me personally. But we made RANGE a worker cooperative because we never wanted this work to live or die with just one person — and especially not one personality — so saving my own skin didn’t feel like much to write home about.
And then.
In October, we got word that RANGE was awarded our largest grant ever. Inatai Foundation has been giving us critical support for a few years now, but this was on a whole other level, and allowed us to create something we’ve been working toward for almost 5 years: the beginnings of a Spanish-language news desk.
And because life sometimes lines up in exactly the way you hope, the person we were able to hire for that role is the exact person who, as a student journalist in 2021, wrote the piece that demonstrated the deep need for Spanish-fluent reporting in our region, Daisy Zavala Magaña.
At the time, RANGE was just me in my attic. Daisy was about to graduate from WSU and begin a career that has already taken her to the largest newspaper in our state and then down to Nogales, Arizona reporting on both sides of the border. I’ve dedicated nearly 20 years of my career to staunching the brain drain of young, creative, ambitious people from Eastern Washington — mostly in the arts, but increasingly in other fields.
It feels weird to say this about a person I had never met in person until a couple weeks ago, but it feels really good to have Daisy back home in Eastern Washington, and I’m really proud it was RANGE that helped make it happen.
In addition to keeping Spokies in Spokane (and in Daisy’s case keeping scablanders in the scablands), We really want to keep journalists in journalism. I had to leave journalism for almost a decade to build the rest of my life. The dream when I started RANGE was for no journalist who works in this newsroom to have to make that same choice.
That’s why it was especially meaningful when Daniel Walters reached out to us. I’d put Daniel’s knowledge of our local politics and governments against anyone’s, but more importantly for me: no one in Spokane has let their own personal earning potential suffer to make sure we all get deeply sourced and informed news about power than him. I lasted eight years as an underpaid reporter in this town. Daniel gutted out 15.
In addition to all the beautiful things Daniel wrote in his introduction column last week, he said one more thing that really stuck with me when we met for coffee to discuss him writing for us.
I felt the need to tell him up front that we didn’t have a full-time position for him. He already knew that, he said, and it wasn’t what he needed, at least not right away. After 15 years of reporting on the ground, like many people before him, Daniel was facing the possible end of his career as a journalist.
If he had to go out, he told me, “I want to do it covering my home town.”
All of this evidence has been right in front of me for months each time Val or Sellers would carefully nudge me to write this damn “I’m back” column, but you can’t always see what’s right in front of you. Sometimes you get in your own way. At least I do.
Then, a little over a week ago, this whole team — Valerie Osier, Erin Sellers, Aaron Hedge, Pascal Bostic, Daisy, Daniel and I, with Sophia Mattice-Aldous dialing in from Pend Oreille County — sat down for our first editorial meeting together. Also sitting in that day was Sara Kersey, Operations Manager for SWC and a huge part of why we still exist. Our office has a meeting room with eight seats. I never thought RANGE would ever fill it. That week we did. If Sophia had joined us in person, we would have had to find another chair.
It was in that room, that day, that the veil I had put over my own eyes wasn’t so much lifted as it was snatched away.
The toxic perfectionist in me couldn’t pretend he didn’t see what I think had been obvious to the rest of our team. That this team has grown so strong. We are extremely capable, and we’re increasingly nimble. It kinda seemed like anything was possible.
For most of the last two years, I’ve felt like I can’t see past whatever crisis needs handling in the moment. In that editorial meeting, not only could I see past that day, I found myself able to reflect on the profound hardship we had endured. It even felt, for a moment, like I could see the future.
I could picture a time where we pack that room every week. I could see a time when we would need to buy a bigger table. Eventually we’ll need to find a larger space entirely.
I felt relief, and even a small amount of joy in the room that day. I like being able to imagine a better future. That night, I went home and cried a little.
I’ve never been able to accomplish anything meaningful in my life without a ton of help from others. Friends and colleagues, yes, but in this case also literally tens of thousands of strangers, many of whom I’ll likely never meet, who love this place, who believe in this place, and who have seen enough value in the ways we’re trying to make institutions work better for people to support those efforts.
Sometimes when a veil is snatched like that, you see something you’ve never seen before.
That night, I also regained a feeling I should have never lost — the immeasurable gratitude I feel, getting to go to work for this community, every day.
